The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights asserts that the Park City School District failed to deal adequately with nearly 200 reports of students harassing other students based on race, ethnicity, disabilities and sex.
The school district superintendent, Jill Gildea, this week vowed to do better.
The agency said this week that its investigation delved into “seven complaints of unlawful harassment” that alleged “ongoing harassment based on race, national origin (including antisemitic harassment), disability, and sex.”
In the course of its investigation, the agency discovered that the district received over 180 reports of students harassing one another during the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. At least some of these reports weren’t appropriately recorded or investigated.
“However, the district’s responses to repeated harassment of Black, Asian, and Jewish students and to harassment based on sex — including slurs, threats, name-calling, gestures, symbols, and assaults, among other actions that negatively affected their access to education — did not meet the district’s federal civil rights obligations,” the agency said.
The district failed in its federal civil rights obligation to investigate the complaints, according to the Office of Civil Rights. In addition, the district’s Title IX coordinator — listed on the district’s website as Michael Santarosa — “did not maintain all records of the district’s responses to the actual notice of sexual harassment, as required by the Department’s 2020 Title IX regulations.”
“These district failures to fulfill Title VI and Title IX responsibilities left children in school without effective responses to being repeatedly called denigrating terms that harassed students based on their race, national origin, and sex, and being physically assaulted,” the agency said. “OCR also identified concerns regarding the district’s record keeping under Title VI and Section 504, and its apparent inadequate responses to students harassing Latino students and students with disabilities.”
The school’s inaction led it out of line with decades-old federal acts that work to secure equality such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, its Education Amendments of 1972, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
The agency stated the district agreed to several actions to ensure it no longer ignores the “valid concerns of marginalized students.” These include reviewing the incidents from 2022-23, review and fix district policies for handling harassment reports and maintaining their records and conducting “a districtwide climate assessment focused on student-to-student harassment.”
In a letter addressed to the “families of Park City School District,” Superintendent Jill Gildea listed several of these commitments.
Her letter also put some of the burden on improving student-to-student behavior on the larger Park City community.
“Ongoing and continuous improvement in the arena of student-to-student behavior is a community-wide effort, and we invite our families to join us in this important work by providing your feedback and involvement in these efforts,” her letter states. “Together, we can create a nurturing and respectful learning environment where every student can thrive.”
The investigation focused on three Park City schools: Ecker Hill Middle School, Treasure Mountain Junior High and Park City High School. The district took action to address some of the reports, the investigation found, such as disciplining certain students.
According to the agreement, the district must now report how it handles all harassment complaints to the Office for Civil Rights throughout the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years.
One Black student reported being racially harassed 17 times by at least 14 different students. The report noted that the district knew of the harassment because the student visited the school’s counseling office. One of the student’s parents also reported the harassment to the school. But when the Office for Civil Rights spoke with the parent, she said no one followed up with her about the report.
In some cases, the district disciplined students by contacting their parents, issuing lunch detentions and suspending them, but the Office for Civil Rights found the responses “proved ineffective because they failed to prevent harassment from recurring and the hostile environment based on race persisted.”
About 80 of the harassment reports that federal investigators found involved sex-based harassment.
That included students “touching or rubbing students’ thighs, hair, butts, breasts, and private parts”; attempting nonconsensual kissing; and threatening sexual assault, the report states.
Some students also called other students misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ slurs and joked in ways that denigrated gay and transgender people.
“Due to the District’s inconsistent recordkeeping, there may have been more incidents,” the report said.
The Salt Lake Tribune contributed to this report. For the full Tribune story, see sltrib.com/news/education/2024/03/22/park-city-school-district-failed/